This week marked the execution of Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis, whose case was considered by many to be deeply flawed. Davis’ execution has served as a wake-up call to the inequities and dangers of capital punishment in the United States.

Yet one influential religious leader appears to have been unphased by the global uproar over Davis’ death and critical examinations of the death penalty. Mohler argued in a Sept. 22 podcast that the death penalty is actually pro-life in a way, because it is intended to “affirm the value [and] sanctity of every single human life“:

A Southern Baptist seminary president says that according to the Bible, capital punishment is pro-life. “The death penalty is not about retribution,” Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said in a podcast Sept. 22. “It is first of all about underlining the importance of every single human life.”

Mohler, who has a Ph.D. in theology, said in Genesis 9, where capital punishment is mandated for murder, “it is precisely because the taking of one human life by another means that the murderer has effectively, morally and theologically, forfeited his own right to live.” “The death penalty is intended to affirm the value [and] sanctity of every single human life, and thus by the extremity of the penalty to make that visible and apparent to all,” Mohler said.

Mohler is an influential figure in Baptist circles in the United State. As he notes on his website, he is president of the “flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention and one of the largest seminaries in the world” and is a board member of the right-wing Focus on the Family. His position on the death penalty stands in stark contrast to that of many other Christian leaders. For example, the Catholic Church, which represents the largest Christian denomination in America, has been generally opposed to the practice since Pope John Paul II declared so in 1995.

The following report was filed from Washington, DC where the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit just heard a challenge to the Affordable Care Act

The genius of the constitutional argument attacking the Affordable Care Act is that it has promised conservative judges an opportunity to make a surgical strike on the law that conservatives hate most — the so-called “individual mandate” requiring everyone to either carry health insurance or pay slightly more income taxes.

Two years ago, the law’s opponents offered a sweeping explanation of why they think this law violates the Constitution: “[t]he federal government does not have the power to regulate Americans simply because they are there.” The problem with this sweeping claim, however, is that it is simply not true. Congress may compel sex offenders to register with local officials after they move into a new jurisdiction. It may conscript unwilling civilians into military service. It may compel individuals to pay taxes. And it may require non-custodial parents to pay child support. President George Washington signed a law requiring freedmen of a certain age to buy firearms. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires lunch counter owners to sell food to African-Americans whether they want to or not. And Congress can force people to sell their land by flexing its power of eminent domain.

So the law’s opponents added an endless series of caveats to their original rule. Conscription is different because it’s not a financial transaction. Gun mandates are different because the Constitution allows Congress to “provide for calling forth the militia.” Eminent domain is different because — well, no one has every actually explained why eminent domain is different — but one federal judge claimed that it is “obviously distinguishable” and thus he does not have to give a reason.

This is an embarrassingly bad way to read the Constitution — judges should not be in the business of crafting customized rules that allow them to strike down one and exactly one provision of law — but it also had exactly one virtue. It allowed conservative judges to strike down the Affordable Care Act without thinking that they would also have to strike down something they actually care about.

That is, of course, until today.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh is a partisan’s partisan. He was a principal author of Clinton inquisitor Ken Starr’s report on the Monica Lewinsky affair. He served in George W. Bush’s White House. And, as he made clear during today’s oral argument, he is a passionate supporter of Social Security privatization.

On at least three or four separate occasions, Kavanaugh noted that if Congress cannot require people to buy health insurance in order to prevent a catastrophic collapse of the entire health insurance market, then it is probably also unconstitutional to repeal Social Security and replace it with a program that requires Americans to buy private annuities that will fund their retirement. (Under Kavanaugh’s theory, it would also be unconstitutional to enact the House GOP’s plan to privatize and then phase out Medicare for the exact same reason).

Based on Kavanaugh’s questions today, it appears very likely that he cares more about preserving Congress’ power to privatize Social Security than he does about undermining one of Barack Obama’s greatest accomplishments, and he appears to be a likely-but-not-certain vote to uphold the law. If a conservative former clerk to Justice Kennedy like Kavanaugh upholds the law, it is very, very difficult to imagine the the Supreme Court will not do the same.

To be sure, the Department of Justice did not have a completely smooth ride today. DOJ attorney Beth Brinkman outright botched an important and expected question from conservative Judge Laurence Silberman: if the Affordable Care Act is constitutional, can Congress force you to buy anything? Brinkman’s weak answer to this question is particularly unfortunate because there is a very easy answer to this question:

The Constitution does not simply allow Congress to regulate commercial markets. It establishes that, in Justice Scalia’s words, “where Congress has the authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce, it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective.”

Scalia’s rule is important because the ACA doesn’t just require people to carry insurance, it also eliminates one of the insurance industry’s most abusive practices — denying coverage to patients with pre-existing conditions. This ban cannot function if patients are free to enter and exit the insurance market at will. If patients can wait until they get sick to buy insurance, they will drain all the money out of an insurance plan that they have not previously paid into, leaving nothing left for the rest of the plan’s consumers.

In this sense, health insurance is unique. The national market for vegetables will not collapse if there is no “broccoli mandate,” and no other federal law depends upon Congress requiring everyone to buy automobiles. Fortunately, the judges appeared to recognize that this is the correct answer to Silberman’s question even though Brinkman stumbled in her own answer. Indeed, Kavanaugh’s very first question to the attorney challenging the law focused on the necessary connection between the coverage requirement and the protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

The judges also spent a great deal of time worrying that a law called the Tax Anti-Injunction Act strips them of jurisdiction to hear the case. This was the rationale behind the Fourth Circuit’s recent Affordable Care Act decision, and it seems likely that one or more judges will be swayed by it. Should the court reach the merits, however, the ACA had a much better day today than anyone anticipated. Given the conservative makeup of this panel, a decision upholding the law on the merits would all but guarantee that the Supreme Court will uphold the law.

The Fifth Circuit is probably the most conservative federal appeals court in the country. It recently sanctioned a cheerleader and alleged rape victim because she sued the school district that required her to cheer for her alleged rapist. Its judges frequently attend “junkets for judges” hosted by an oil-industry funded group. And the court has developed such a reputation as a safe haven for the oil industry that the House GOP recently tried to shift many important oil drilling lawsuits into this court.

Few people capture the essence of the Fifth Circuit better than its chief judge, Edith Jones. During a recent court hearing considering a criminal defendant’s drug conviction, Jones became incensed because she believed one of her few left-of-center colleagues was asking too many questions, and she angrily cut him off:

CHIEF JUDGE JONES: Judge Dennis!

JUDGE DENNIS: Can I, can I, can I ask a question?

CHIEF JUDGE JONES: You have monopolized, uh, uh, seven minutes….

JUDGE DENNIS: Well, I’m way behind on asking questions in this court. I have been quiet a lot of times, and I am involved in this case….

CHIEF JUDGE JONES slams her hand down on the table (loudly), stands halfway up out of her chair, and points toward the door.

CHIEF JUDGE JONES: Would you like to leave?

JUDGE DENNIS: Pardon? What did you say?

CHIEF JUDGE JONES: I want you to shut up long enough for me to suggest that perhaps….

JUDGE DENNIS: Don’t tell me to shut up….

CHIEF JUDGE JONES: … you should give some other judge a chance to ask a question …

Listen:

The fact that Jones cut off one of her progressive colleagues is a minor issue, but arises against a background of mean-spirited and ideological decisions. Jones once wrote a dissenting opinion claiming that a female worker who “was repeatedly propositioned, was groped and grabbed, [had] pornography [] placed in her locker, and [had] other employees broadcast[] obscene comments about her over the company’s public address system” did not experience sexual harassment. At oral argument, she even suggested the woman would need to be raped to claim such harassment.

In other dissent, Jones wrote that a 15-year-old student who was molested by her high school teacher for over a year could not sue the school district because there is “no broad constitutional purpose to be served by recognizing for [a victim's] benefit a constitutional right not to have her bodily integrity compromised by a teacher’s sexual abuse.”

Jones ranks fourth in the nation among judges who have attended corporate junkets, and she once joined a dissent claiming that a death row defendant whose lawyer slept through much of his trial was not denied his constitutional right to counsel.

While anti-death penalty advocates around the world focused on the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia Wednesday night, the state of Texas went about quietly executing Lawrence Brewer. Brewer was convicted of murdering James Byrd, whom Brewer dragged to death behind his pickup truck in 1998.

Before he was executed, Brewer, like all of Texas’ death row inmates, was able to request his last meal. Brewer made the most of that request, asking for two chicken fried steaks, a triple meat bacon cheeseburger, a cheese omelet, a large bowl of fried okra, three fajitas, a pint of Blue Bell ice cream and a pound of barbecue with half a loaf of white bread. Brewer’s last meal incensed Democratic state Sen. John Whitmire, a long-time senator who is particularly influential on prison issues. Calling the last meal request an “extremely inappropriate” privilege that “the perpetrator did not provide to their victim,” Whitmire wrote a letter to the Texas Criminal Justice Division asking it to end the practice, Houston Press reports:

Whitmire wrote to the executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice Division that he had long opposed the practice, and “enough is enough.” [...] “I am asking you to end this practice immediately or I am prepared to do so by statute next session,” he wrote.

Whitmire won’t have to end the practice by statute, because the Criminal Justice Division relented Thursday afternoon, with Executive Director Brad Livingston saying in a statement:

I believe Senator Whitmire’s concerns regarding the practice of allowing death row offenders to choose their last meal are valid. Effective immediately, no such accommodations will be made. They will receive the same meal served to other offenders on the unit.

What Whitmire hopes to accomplish by denying death row inmates a final meal of their request is unclear. The last meal, however ridiculous it may sometimes be, is a traditional ritual on death row, and seems a small issue in the process of the state-sanctioned taking of a human life. It seems the state of Texas, which has executed more people than any other state since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, is seeking ways to make its penal system even more cruel than it already is. But given the questionable nature of many of the state’s executions, which include juveniles, the mentally ill, and the potentially innocent, the real tragedy is that the death penalty still exists at all.

Rick Perry believes Social Security is unconstitutional. His book Fed Up! says that Social Security exists “at the expense of respect for the Constitution,” and video of him saying Social Security is unconstitutional is available online.

Yet, in last night’s debate, Perry managed to completely disavow this view and then suddenly re-embrace it again just one hour later. At about 9:30 last night, in response to a question from Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, Perry denied ever saying that Social Security is beyond the federal government’s power and therefore must be handled solely by state governments:

KELLY: Gov. Perry, Gov. Romney has been hammering you on your idea of turning Social Security back to the states. Repeatedly. Can you explain, specifically, how fifty separate social security systems are supposed to work? [...]

PERRY: Now, it’s not the first time that Mitt’s been wrong on issues before. And the bottom line is that we never said that we were going to move this back to the states.

Nevertheless, at about 10:30 last night, Perry changed position again — this time insisting that he is retreating “not an inch” from the positions he stated in his book. Watch both of Perry’s contradictory positions:

It’s clear at this point that Perry wants to create an image of himself that is firm and unwaivering, but that he also doesn’t want his candidacy to be tarred with any of the extremist positions he quite openly and honestly expressed before he decided to run for president. Perry can’t have it both ways, no matter how many times he tries. The bottom line is that Perry either needs to start being honest again about his desire to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, and other essential programs that he believes to be unconstitutional, or he needs to candidly admit that he is reversing his entire stance on the Constitution.